No big stories, but a couple fun ones.
The first show I went to in 78 was local and in a Holiday Inn in Burlington Ma. It was the "second annual" while the show lasted a long time, well into the 90's and maybe past 2000? It changed promoters and the hotel changed chains several times. I still have the little ad for the show which was a bit bigger than a mid 50's card.
Anyway, first show, and I found out about it from the local dealer whose store I hung out at. Their table happened to be the first one inside the entrance. As I stopped and started looking at the stuff they had set up one of the guys comes over and says " Steve, you've already seen all this stuff beat it and go look at the other tables. " Pretty cool for them to push me towards the other dealers.
Of course, I was spending a couple hours maybe three days a week in the shop and doing some set building for them, so I was a fairly captive customer.
Second was the Wilmington show, forget the year, but Brooks Robinson was the main autograph guest. I'd already gotten an auto from him years before and he'd been incredibly cool (Small adult venue, and he made the whole line wait while he talked about baseball with the one kid there
) I'd picked up a boxful of MSA discs that had a bunch of his cards, and was sorting it while I was having lunch. A kid and his dad sat at the table and started talking about getting the autographs. After a couple minutes I asked the kid if he liked Robinson. He did, and actually knew something about his career which had probably ended before the kids was born. Asked him what he thought of the discs, which he thought were cool. So I told him Brooks had been really great to me when I was about the same age and gave him a stack of discs with a couple Robinsons and a few other players who were or would be in the HOF. A nice bit of excitement for him. And more fun for me than I'd expected.
Steve B